WSJ. Magazine September 2015 Men’s Style: The Columnists

WSJ. asks six luminaries to weigh in on a single topic. This month: Willpower

Meb Keflezighi

“Willpower is something you practice daily. You don’t come to the exam unprepared. In training, you have a dialogue with yourself: I think I’m ready with speed, with race pace—I think I can cover the distance. After the London Olympics, where I didn’t win a medal, I was in a wheelchair. I put everything on the line—my feet were brutally blistered from the cobblestones. I was not prepared. But after finishing fourth, I also knew internally that I could win New York or Boston. At Boston in 2014 I’d been told that I was too old. At 17 miles, I remember making the right turn at the Newton fire station. I’d just run a 4:31 mile, my foot was aching badly. But I was like, ‘Ignore the pain. You are carrying the nation on your back. This is for Boston. This is for the United States. Just stick to it.’ You can’t win every race, but you just have to dig deep and keep digging.”

—Keflezighi is a long-distance runner who won the Boston Marathon in 2014 at 38.

Tracy Anderson

Tracy Anderson

“I think willpower is something that we all have, but it has to be ignited. Willpower requires you to be straight with and have tough conversations with yourself. You have to really figure out where the imbalances are in your life and fix them. You can make excuses for why you needed the candy in the office or why you couldn’t get your workout in, but they’re just not true. The willpower behind doing a juice cleanse for seven days to get bikini-ready is the wrong kind—it’s driven byvanity. The better kind is driven by a vision of what the human body can do with focus and achievement. Music helps—it’s the classic tool for pumping yourself up. I put on Eminem’s “Not Afraid” and I’m like, This is right: I’m not stopping, I’m not folding, I’m not derailing here. And a Van Halen song can get me through just about anything.”

—Anderson is a personal trainer and fitness entrepreneur.

Roy Baumeister

Roy Baumeister

“We need to understand willpower as a limited energy. The human willpower glass is very much half full and half empty. We get a lot more than other creatures do, and it’s contributed immensely to the success of our species. But I think there’s also the sense that if we had a little more, we would do even better. I call self-control the moral muscle. It’s what creates the capacity for humans to act in certain ways when they don’t want to. So what we need to understand is that we have this marvelous capacity but that it is not unlimited. It fails sometimes. The key is that self-control works through habits. By setting up good habits, you’re not resisting temptation or getting yourself out of jams or fighting the odds, but rather you’re using your self-control to set life up to run on autopilot. Then it runs smoothly, and you can save your willpower to put into more creative endeavors.”

—Baumeister is a psychology professor at Florida State University and the co-author of Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.

Marie Kondo

Marie Kondo

“With willpower, I think about the balancing point between having the determination to start something and having the wisdom to stop. When I was younger I would reach a point in my tidying where I would throw out almost anything. My brother’s stuff, my sister’s—even my parents’ and my teachers’ things weren’t safe. What for many people is so difficult to start—tidying—was sometimes difficult for me to stop. One of the most common questions I hear is ‘Your book helped me, but what can I do about the messiness of my husband, wife, co-worker, etc.?’ I always answer the same way: ‘Nothing. You can’t change them, and you shouldn’t try.’ Show them what you have achieved through your tidy room, your freer soul, and let them find their own way forward. Willpower is not only the drive to change yourself, it’s also the sense of understanding that this power has limits.”

—Kondo is an organization expert and the author of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.

David Sedaris

David Sedaris

“The level of my willpower depends on what I’m trying to stay away from. When it came to giving up drugs, cigarettes and alcohol, I felt slightly above average. Ditto the first 10 times I lost weight. Lately though, at least in the dieting department, I’m starting to feel below average. I have breasts now and can feel them jiggling as I run to the ice cream truck. My problem is I have to overdo pretty much everything. I got a Fitbit last year, and even that I overdo. On an average day I walk between 15 and 20 miles. I’ve walked so much that three of my toenails have fallen off. I get up in the middle of the night and practically have to crawl to the bathroom. I’m crippling myself but I can’t stop. My partner, Hugh, does everything in moderation. I don’t know if that’s willpower or just a healthier level of sanity.”

—Sedaris is a bestselling author and humorist.

Kris Carr

Kris Carr

“I think it’s important to reframe adversity a little bit. It’s not always a bad thing. And yes, tough stuff or heartbreaking things happen, and I certainly don’t want to minimize that. But a big turning point in my journey of living with cancer came when I started looking for the opportunities among the obstacles. It’s kind of cliché but it’s true: There’s a lot of personal growth inside of those obstacles. Cancer has asked me to stretch myself, to bump up against my edge and push past it. I define willpower as consistent energy directed toward a goal. But if you’re not careful using it, willpower can lead to burnout. It can get you out of balance. When you’re too rigid or strict or hard on yourself, willpower becomes white-knuckling, and there’s nothing fun or inspiring about that. For me, willpower is passion. It’s positive, it’s desire, it’s energy. It is the animating life force.”

—Carr is an author and health advocate who documented her battle with cancer in the documentary Crazy Sexy Cancer.